If your body is hurting

the problem probably isn’t

• the exercises you do or sports you play
• the injury you didn’t fully recover from
• throwing out your back reaching for a Kleenex
• the text neck epidemic
• slouching over your computer for at least 8 hours a day
• or long distance drives

And, you probably

• don’t need to learn every stretch known to man
• don’t need surgery
• don’t need to go to 1000 therapist to hopefully find the “one that works”
• don’t need to invest too much money to get out of your pains or to recover from your injuries

What you need is Counter Movement.

I’ve been through pain, never broke a major bone, but been hit in the nose, punched in the face, have had major sprains, chronic back, neck and shoulder pain, and the worst was when the entire right side of my body went numb – a probable spinal cord injury, that’s as serious as they get!

At 42 I’m still doing jiu-jitsu with people more than 1/2 my age, and even though I have some pain and minor expected injuries, my body feels better today than it did twenty years ago.

What I want to share is my story on how that changed, why I feel better today, am more functional now than 2 decades ago, and how you can be too!

Ice, rest, ointments, therapy, foam rollers, therapy balls, colored tape, round cupping bruises, powering through injury and pain are all cool, but there’s a whole set of tools within us that actually have more profound effects, in my scientific opinion.

20 years ago I started to do research and I learned a Rolf Structural Integration (RSI) which gave me the info to begin the journey to recovery than has given me longevity that I never dreamed of.

I’m grateful for having been in pain because it set my career path. My friend Rob who was the legendary boxer, Oscar De La Hoya’s trainer, massage therapist, and health coach, got me functional after a series of injuries, chronic neck, and low back pain slowed down my training.

On Rob’s advice I went to Colorado to study with two of the master’s of Dr. Rolf’s work known as Rolf Structural Integration. That was a life changing experience and for the last 2o years I’ve been using SI to help people out of pain and increase their performance.

About 6 years ago I had an ah ha moment. A client asked me, “Who works on your body? My response was, “No one.” And they also mentioned how well I embodied my work.

At that moment it dawned on me that all the testing and exploring of my own pains had brought me to a place where I figured out what I needed to do to shift my chronic issues, and how I could speed up the healing of acute injuries. From this “self-discovery” a system began to emerge.

I call it Counter Movement.

The Counter Movement System (CMS) is about breaking old habits and moving past prevailing movement patterns to access the benefits that come with going into opposite end ranges of movement.

CMS is simple, precise and transformative:

1. Simple. A simple but overarching idea so that people understand what and why they are doing something. It had to have a simple but profound theory.
2. Precise. Precise in helping people figure out the #1, #2, (and #3 if needed) things that are a staple need for this person to maintain a high level of function with a minimum time for recovery.
3. Engage neurological function. Cues to shift the autonomic NS are embedded into CMS so they become natural accessible tools in recovery.

Theoretically, the functional goal of Counter Movement is a backflip. Simply because a backflip is the counter extreme to everything 99.9% of people do daily.

A backflip is challenging at every level of your being. It challenges every comfort. But, it’s in comfort that we first begin to build our own suffering. Our comfort zones are where we create our habits. At first habits are strengths, if we continuously rely on those strengths they eventually turn into over-strengths that inevitably become limitation, weakness, and fragility.

In future blogs we’ll visit areas of the body and look at how you can begin to apply Counter Movement to enhance your life.

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If you need to get a hold of me at my Dublin office, call or text 925.922.2246